Commercial Art

Commercial Art, with different titles over the years, claimed to be the only British monthly magazine covering design until the Council of Industrial Design began to publish Design in 1949. For most of its existence it was published by The Studio Ltd. whose founding family, the Holmes, were to be actively involved, from grandfather to grandsons. The Studio Ltd were already publishing art and design related magazines (The Studio from 1893 and The Studio Decorative Yearbook from 1906), when it decided to plunge into the vulgarity of ¿commercial¿ art, buying up an existing magazine with that title in 1926. Most of the rest of the 1920s and into the ¿30s it concentrated on the graphic arts, but increasing in the late ¿30s its focus shifted to industrial design. The shift was acknowledged by title changes, first to Commercial Art & Industry and to Art & Industry.

In 1957, with death duty problems, the family were forced to sell